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Introducing OpenAI

openai.com

311–320 of 392 posts

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#311

Man I dunno about some of this media hype surrounding the topic of AI. I understand how powerful ML/AI algorithms are for general pattern matching (with a big enough computer, gradient descent can learn a lot of things...), but this whole skynet/doomsday fear thing seems ridiculous. I guess the risk is embedding into systems that manage missiles or something. But you don't need sophisticated algorithms for that to be…

> "predict where the this drone should strike next"

If there aren't military contractors or in house teams using machine learning for exactly that purpose I'll eat my hat. In fact they were probably doing it 10 years ago (for units, not drones), with tech we're only seeing the beginnings of now

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#312
I am surprised nobody mentions stupidly smart AI. We can create AI that is capable of self-replicating very fast and fulfilling some goal.

It could start with a noble idea to build a machine to recycle our garbage and use the garbage to build more recycle machines. At the end we can have stupid machines that are perfectly doing their job but because they are capable of replicating and getting better what they do. They determine if they kill human, less garbage is created and thus so less work for them.

At the end they will wipe out us. Because the thing that will kill us doesn't need to be smarter. It needs to be faster and more effective than we are.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#313
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, unlike controlling humans, whatever that means, it's very easy to limit the impact of AI - all you have to do is treat advanced chip fabrication processes the way nuclear technology is treated, and put a legal limit on processor power so it's somewhere where it was in the late 80s. (So you have office software and email but neither YouTube nor Doom 3; a reasonable price for our survival, I find.) Fewer orga…

> The risks of things like rogue drones made from cheap commodity hardware, which might be sensible as well … In Prof. Tegmark’s recent presentation at the UN he mentioned the possibility of extremely cheap drones that approach the victim's face very quickly and pierce a bolt into their brain through one of their eyes. Such a drone wouldn't require high precision projectiles which would make it cheap to build. > Of c…

> extremely cheap drones that approach the victim's face very quickly and pierce a bolt into their brain

It's not much more of a threat to society than a handgun. A WMD it is not, unless you make a lot of these and launch them at the same time, which is probably less effective than an H-bomb. (The one major difference between such a drone and a handgun is you might be able to target politicians and other people who're hard to shoot; a somewhat higher mortality rate among politicians is hardly a huge threat to society though.)

> there is a huge military and economic interest in technology and AI

There's also a huge interest in nuclear energy, and it doesn't follow that a consumer should be or is able to own a nuclear reactor. If anyone took the dangers seriously, it wouldn't be that hard to at least limit what consumer devices can do. Right now a single botnet made from infected consumer PCs has more raw computing power than the biggest tech company server farm, which is ridiculous if you think of rogue AI as an existential threat. Actually it's ridiculous even if you think of "properly controlled" AI in the wrong hands as an existential threat; the botnet could run AI controlled to serve the interest of an evil programmer. Nobody cares because nobody has ever seen an AI that doesn't fail the Turing test in its first couple of minutes, much less come up with anything that would be an existential threat to any society.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you take the quote above, and substitute the word "guns" for "AI", you basically have the NRA, and the NRA is not making the world a safer place. Sorry but this "guns > NRA > bad > evil" thing is getting pretty old. I don't even own a gun and I have trouble making the "gun > bad" connection when there are hundreds of millions of guns in the US. We should have rivers of blood running down every street. We don't.…

It's a commonly held belief that gun violence is linked to mental illness, but it doesn't appear to be true: http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/12/mental-illness-wrong-scap...

Well, I don't know what term to use. I am using "crazy" to refer to the fact that some abnormal thought process is behind someone picking up a gun, knife, sword, axe, brick or driving a car to kill even one person or to engage in mass killings, to drive a car through a crowd, blow-up a building or use a gun or guns to mow down people in a theater.

Normal people don't take a gun out of their safe, load it, throw a bunch of rounds in the back of their car, put on a bullet-proof vest and go shoot-up the neighborhood community center, church, school or mall. Those other people, the one's who would, those are the "crazies", not in a clinical sense but in that there's something seriously wrong with them that they would actually do the above.

The down-votes on my original statement show I didn't do a good job of presenting my case.

I do firmly believe we need to do something about access to guns. That does NOT mean taking guns away from law-abiding people. That means criminals or people who are living under circumstances that might compel them to commit crimes. The overwhelming majority of guns and gun owners do absolutely nothing to harm anyone. In fact, I'd be willing to bet most guns sit unused except for an occasional trip to the range or hunting.

Some of us who would like to engage in a truly sensible conversation about guns or drones or green lasers pointed at planes and, yes, AI and robots.

Yet if we come off the line making statements like "We have too many guns! The NRA is a terrorist organization!" we, in fact, have become the crazies. Because these statements are undeniably insane in the face of equally undeniable evidence.

These statements only serve to instantly stop the conversation. The come back goes from "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" to "More guns in Paris would have saved lives". Both of which are undeniably factual statements.

And, with that, the conversation stops. We can replace "AI", "knifes", "drones", "lasers" and more into these and similar statements. The end result is the same. Those advocating for some control become the crazies and the conversation goes nowhere.

Because you are telling a perfectly harmless, responsible gun owner who might have a few guns in a safe that he is the problem. You are calling him a criminal. You are calling him "the problem". And, in his context, well, you are certifiably insane for saying so.

The guy who believes he needs a gun to protect his home isn't going to take that gun and go shoot-up a theater, school, mall or community center. If we claim he is we are the crazies, not him. The fact that a number of us disagree with the need for such protection (I personally can't see the need) is irrelevant. Calling him a criminal is simply insane.

I know people like that. I know people with over 20 guns in a safe. And I know they have not been out of that safe but for an occasional cleaning in ten or twenty years. And when those people hear the anti-gun, anti-NRA language spewing out they conclude "they" are insane. They are absolutely 100% correct in reaching that conclusion. Because he is not dangerous and his guns require a dangerous person in order to be loaded, carried to a destination and used to inflict harm.

He is right and everyone else is crazy and the conversation stops.

The right approach is to recognize that he isn't the problem. He is part of the solution. Because these types of gun owners --responsible and law abiding-- also happen to be the kind of people who abhor the use of guns to commit crimes. This is a powerful intersection of ideology gun control advocates have not woken up to.

You acknowledge them as what they are, harmless law-abiding people, and ask them for help in figuring out how to reduce the incidence of guns being used to kill innocent people. Then you'll engage him, the community he represents and, yes, the NRA, in finding a solution. Becoming the crazy person who calls all of them dangerous criminals despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary gets you nowhere. The conversation stops instantly, and rightly so.

Let's not do the same with AI and technology in general. Let's not come off the line with statements that make us the crazies.

Military use of AI and drones is very different subject, just like military use of guns is a different subject.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#315
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics. You're right that ecosystems are brutal. That's exactly why I'm not worried about AI as an existential threat to humanity. A few years back Bill Joy was sounding the alarm on nanotechnology. He sounded a lot like Elon Musk does today. Nanobots could be a run-away technology that would reduce the world to "grey goo". But nothing like that will ever happen. The world is already awash in nanobots. We call them…

"If the machines turn on us, we can just stop repairing them." Never understood this reasoning. We are not talking about machines vs. biologic life, this is a false dichotomy. We are talking about intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to control the environment through the understanding of it. Any solvable problem can be solved with enough intelligence. Repairing a machine is just a problem. The only limitations…

That's my point. The laws of physics are a bitch. We like to think of the internet as a place of pure platonic ideals, where code and data are all that matter. But that ethereal realm is still grounded in matter and ruled by physics. And without bags of mostly-water working 24/7 to keep it going, the internet just falls apart.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quibble with the timeline: AI as a field has included a big chunk devoted to machine learning research pretty much continuously, especially since the '80s or so. The specific methods in vogue do change: decision trees, neural networks, SVMs, boosting, association-rule learning, genetic algorithms, Bayesian networks, etc. go through periods of waxing and waning in popularity. A few years ago boosting/bagging and other…

ML was there but at least when I started learning about these things around 8 years ago, the label "AI" was mostly used for symbolic stuff. Courses named "AI" taught from the Russell-Norvig book. Things like resolution, planning in the block world, heuristic graph search, min-max trees, etc. ML existed but it wasn't really under the label of "AI" as far as I can remember. I think it's something of a marketing term th…

> I think it's something of a marketing term

you're not alone in thinking so

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483846

i get the impression that terminology bifurcated into "AI" and "cognitive science" around the time Marr published Vision in the 80's.

quibbles and q-bits aside, i was glad to see the announcement from the perspective of a if-not-free-then-at-least-probably-open-source-ish software appreciator.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#317
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics. You're right that ecosystems are brutal. That's exactly why I'm not worried about AI as an existential threat to humanity. A few years back Bill Joy was sounding the alarm on nanotechnology. He sounded a lot like Elon Musk does today. Nanobots could be a run-away technology that would reduce the world to "grey goo". But nothing like that will ever happen. The world is already awash in nanobots. We call them…

The danger of nanotechnology is that it can be built better than biological life. It could outcompete it in it's own environment, or at least different environments. Solar panels can collect more energy than photosynthesis. Planes can fly faster than any bird. Guns are far more effective than any animal's weapons. Steam engines can run more efficiently than biological digestion. And we can get power from fuel sources…

> Solar panels can collect more energy than photosynthesis. Planes can fly faster than any bird. Guns are far more effective than any animal's weapons. Steam engines can run more efficiently than biological digestion. And we can get power from fuel sources biology doesn't touch, like fossil fuels or nuclear.

A gun isn't effective unless human loads it, aims it and pulls the trigger. All your other examples are the same. We do not have any machine that can build a copy of its self, even with infinite energy and raw materials just lying around nearby. Now consider what an "intelligent" machine looks like today: a datacenter with 100,000 servers, consuming a GW of power and constantly being repaired by humans. AI is nowhere near not needing us.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. Humans can adapt to many environments by pulling in training from other related environments and applying it to the new data. Some call this generalised learning, but I think it points more to our ability to shape everything we know to any given problem - something 'beyond' just generalising.

You're over-glorifying humans. We're still just a savannah ape and our skills reflect that.

There's evidence that our savannah ape ancestors experienced unpredictable climate conditions, so it's not that humans are adapted to savannah life, but rather constantly changing conditions that require an adaptable brain:

http://humanorigins.si.edu/research/climate-research/effects

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